Curiously the perfect weapon against rampant aliteracy emerged more than 50 years ago in the form of an utterly addictive synthesis of word and picture: the comic book.
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…
The plushly armchaired reception area and busy switchboard was manned, with laxity and a cut-glass accent, by the Hon. Antonia Beresford, who made up in elegance what she lacked in efficiency.
We select one mathematical object, the gamma function, and show how it grew in concept and in content from the time of Euler to the recent mathematical treatise of Bourbaki, and how, in this growth, it partook of the general development of mathematics over the past two and a quarter centuries.
